If you engage with an AI bot for very long, it will quickly give the appearance of being very intelligent. In a lot of ways, it is! When it really comes down to it, though, these tools are not very smart at all.

Katie Mack recently shared her thoughts on this in a post on Bluesky, and it summarizes things perfectly:

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

She followed up a few days later with more info, including some great insight on why we’ve all been sort of tricked into thinking they’re so wise:

I suspect that fact that the vast majority of LLM users don’t seem to have received this (really very simple!) message is because the AI companies have a vested interest in us not understanding it. “ChatGPT is smart, it just makes mistakes sometimes” is much more marketable than the truth.

This played out recently when ChatGPT got destroyed in a game of chess against an Atari 2600 (a machine with literally one millionth the computing power from nearly 50 years ago). The reason was simple: the Atari was trained to play chess, whereas ChatGPT is trained to talk about chess. AI tools can’t actually reason their way through games like this (at least not yet), and this example really showed it.

AI tools are amazing, and we use them quite a lot, but it’s important to know how they work and where the major shortcomings lie.

I’ve been using Readwise for a few years now, as it’s a fantastic tool. It’s my default app to avoid doomscrolling, and most of the other people I’ve talked to about reading use it quite a bit.

If you’re not familiar with it, the idea is pretty simple; you save your book highlights in there, and then you can search or review them as needed. I use their “Daily Review” every morning to randomly show old highlights to help keep them fresh in my mind.

Now Readwise has added a new feature called Audio Reviews, and it’s essentially what you’d expect — they use AI to read your daily highlights. However, they go a few steps further and wrap them into some other AI-generated conversation with an overview of what’s coming up, a bit about the highlights themselves, and then a wrap-up at the end. Here is a quick overview from their team.

All in all, the audio review generally lasts around five minutes for 10 reviews, which is pretty slow — but that might be a good thing. Similar to my use of ElevenReader, perhaps this slow approach is a better way to do it. I sometimes rush through those reviews, so this will force me to go a little more slowly. Plus, the meta analysis by the AI tool may raise some other insights that I hadn’t considered.

Whether I stick with it or not, this is certainly a case of using AI to help make you better and I encourage you to check it out.

Bonus: Readwise in Claude

While I was digging into this feature, I also found this recent video where they should you how to pull your recent highlights from Readwise into Claude. It was a little tricky, but I got it set up in about 10 minutes and it’s a nice little addition!

Do you use the Readwise Daily Review at all?

As I’ve been reworking how I read and take notes, the resulting notes file that I create after reading a book is much more comprehensive (and I’ll share that full process soon). This is even more the case with books like this one, where the author had clear breakdowns of her ideas in every chapter.

It’s a fantastic book, and these notes will be helpful for me to revisit over time. I encourage you to check out the book for yourself and let me know what you think.

Notes from “Cues” by Vanessa Van Edwards

In any profession, cues enable people to share brilliant ideas. How you say “hello” when you walk into a room significantly influences what everyone thinks of you. In Cues, Van Edwards shows how to convey warmth and competence in every interaction with co-workers and clients.

The Cues

Warmth Cues

• Tilting
• Nodding
• Eyebrow Raise
• Savor Smiles
• Touch
• Mirroring

Competence Cues

• Power Posture
• Flexed Lid
• Steeple
• Explanatory Gestures
• Palm Flash

Charisma Cues

• Leaning
• Fronting
• Anti-Blocking
• Space Smarts
• Gaze

Danger Zone

• Distancing
• Self-Soothing
• Blocking
• Shame
• Bothered Face

Introduction: The Signals That Are Secretly Shaping You

Summary: Introduces “cues” as the secret signals shaping how others perceive us, emphasizing that “small signals have big impact” in social and professional settings.

Chapter 1 – Cue for Charisma

Summary: Charisma combines warmth and competence cues to make people feel both safe and impressed; as she writes, “Charisma is a balance of warmth and competence.”

Warmth Cues + Competence Cues = Charisma

• “First, we quickly assess someone’s warmth, answering the question: Can I trust you?
• Then we look for competence, answering the question: Can I rely on you?”

“You might notice that highly competent people will often partner with highly warm folks to balance them out. Many famous duos include a highly warm character and a highly competent character. This is a good way to think about how these traits play off each other.”

Higher in Warmth: Your desire to be liked can get in the way of your need to be respected.
Higher in Competence: Competence without warmth is likely to leave us feeling suspicious.

Competent

• Impressive
• Powerful
• Smart
• Capable
• An Expert
• Effective

Warm

• Trustworthy
• Collaborative
• Kind
• Compassionate
• A Team Player
• Open

Chapter 2 – How Cues Work

Summary: Explains how our brains decode cues instantly to assess trust and power, noting “our neurons are wired to read cues before we are consciously aware of them.”

The Cue Cycle

• Decode: Cues read and interpreted from others ->
• Internalize: Cues affect our behavior and mood ->
• Encode: Cues we send to others – accidentally or on purpose ->

Part 1 – Nonverbal Cues

Chapter 3 – The Body Language of Leaders

Summary: Shows that leaders display powerful body language such as open postures and forward leans, with the insight: “Nonverbal prowess is a leader’s secret weapon.”

Lean Like a Leader: Lean in to show and stimulate interest, engagement, and agreement.

Open Body, Open Mind: To inspire openness, open up nonverbally.

Front Forward: If you want someone to feel heard, accepted, and respected, turn toward them.

Be Smart with Space: Highly charismatic people leverage space to show and encourage intimacy.

Engage with Gaze: Gaze with purpose

“We have just learned our five big charisma cues (and many little ones in between)—these are the nonverbal signals that can be used for both warmth and competence. Remember to front, stay open, lean in, use space, and gaze with purpose.”

Chapter 4 – The Wow Factor

Summary: Reveals that impactful first impressions rely on confident body language, neat appearance, and intentional signals to create the “wow factor” in any meeting.

Time Your Tilts: Head tilts show interest, curiosity, and appeasement.

Nod to Know: Nod yes to get more yeses.

Eyebrows Raise Expectations: The eyebrow raise is the fastest way to show interest and curiosity and capture attention.

Savor Smiles: Smiles spread joy and create joy.. but only when they’re sincere.

• “The best way to tell the difference between a real and a fake smile is that a real smile activates those eye crinkles, or crow’s-feet”
• “Don’t perma-smile, be smile ready.”

A Touch of Trust: Purposefully touch to build trust.

Mirroring Makes You Magnetic: Meet people where they’re at by mirroring – match the positive, transform the negative.

“Do any of your pictures have an open mouth smile and a head tilt? In an analysis, Career Experts found that LinkedIn profile pictures that depict an open mouth smile with a slight head tilt were seen as the best pictures.”

Chapter 5 – How to Look Powerful

Summary: Teaches how power cues like strong posture, steepling hands, and stillness project authority, stating “power cues command respect without a word.”

Powerful Posture: Use confident posture to inspire confidence.

All Seeing, All Knowing: A lower lid flex shows contemplation, suspicion, and scrutiny – be ready for it!

Smart People Steeple: The steeple is a power pose for your hands. Use it show confident contemplation.

Excel at Explaining: Explanatory gestures help you explain and others understand.

Palm Power: Show your palm to cue attention.

How to Nicely Get Someone to Stop Interrupting You:

• The fish (mouth slightly open)
• The Bookmark (hand up to say “I’ve got more”)
• The Anchor Touch (touch to get their attention)

Chapter 6 – How to Spot a Bad Buy … and Not Be One Yourself

Summary: Provides cues for detecting deception (e.g. incongruent microexpressions) and warns to avoid giving off untrustworthy cues ourselves, as “no single cue reveals a liar, but clusters do.”

Distancing: Physical distance can create emotional distance. Don’t turn away, turn toward. Don’t step back, move in.

Self-Comfort: Comfort gestures distract and detract from your charisma.

Block It Out: We block our bodies, eyes, and mouths to protect ourselves.

The Signal of Shame: The shame touch is a signal flare of nervousness.

Are You Okay?: Be aware of what cues your face is sending at rest – avoid accidental anger, contempt, and sadness.

• Anger
  • “Incredibly, research found that people who use Botox to numb their furrow muscles feel less angry and irritable. When your muscles physically can’t make the face of anger, you actually feel less angry. However, if people Botox their smile lines, they also feel less joy.”
• Sadness
• Contempt

“CONGRUENCE: When our nonverbal cues and verbal content align.”

Part 2 – Vocal, Verbal, and Imaginary Cues

Vocal Cues

Chapter 7 – Sound Powerful

Summary: Shows that vocal cues such as deep pitch, confident volume, and steady pace project power, with the key takeaway: “Your voice can cue power before your words do.”

How to Sound Confident: Use space and breath to engage the lowest end of your natural tone.

• “While we’re uncomfortable listening to a nervous pitch, we love hearing a confident pitch. When we use our lowest comfortable pitch, we project confidence. It’s important to draw a distinction here. Confident pitch is not as deep as you can possibly go in your vocal range, but is the lowest pitch you can employ comfortably.”

Be Taken Seriously: If you want people to stop questioning you, then stop accidentally using the question inflection.

Eliminate Vocal Fry… Forever: Vocal fry undermines your vocal confidence.

Volume Control Shows Emotional Control: Vary your volume to highlight what’s important.

Pause for Power: Powerful people pause purposefully.

Chapter 8 – Vocal Likability

Summary: Discusses how vocal warmth cues like expressive tone, vocal variation, and clear articulation make speakers sound likable and trustworthy.

Make a Memorable Vocal First Impression: Never answer the phone in a bad mood – or while holding your breath.

Sound Friendly: Warm people up with permission, authentic happiness, and a vocal hug.

How to Sound More Interesting: Vocal variety makes you sound more interesting.

• “When I’m nervous, I tend to swallow my name. I’ve had to practice slowing myself down. When I say my name, I gesture toward my heart and enunciate my name clearly, instead of rushing through it. I’ve found many people rush through their name. After all, we’ve heard our own name a million times but your audience hasn’t, so say it slowly.”
• “Struggle with pauses or speak too fast? Add pause lines.”

Sound Encouraging and Inviting: Vocal invitations gift warmth, encouragement, and appreciation to others.

Channel Your Charisma

Verbal Cues

Chapter 9 – How to Communicate with Charisma

Summary: Emphasizes using “power words” and warm language to influence perception, sharing the Hotmail example: “‘PS: I Love You. Get Your Free Email at Hotmail.com’ was the single biggest driver of user growth.”

• “They decided to try for both a heartwarming feel and a straight ask. They came up with this line and added it to the bottom of every email: “PS: I Love You. Get Your Free Email at Hotmail.com.”
• In just the first few weeks, Hotmail exploded in popularity. Bhatia and Smith didn’t realize the postscript is one of the most read parts of a message. In his research, communications consultant and author Dr. Frank Luntz found that the postscript is the second most read part of a message after the opener.”

Email Audit: Your written cues signal warmth, competence, and charisma just as much as nonverbal cues.

Stop Being Boring: When your communication matters, use verbal cues to make it memorable.

Create Charisma: Use warm cues to call out to warm people. Use competent cues to call out to competent people. When in doubt, use charisma cues to hit both.

Inspirational or Informational: Warm people seek inspiration. Competent people seek information.

• “No matter what, steer clear of the Danger Zone by avoiding asking anything boring or negative. Never ask “Been busy?” and try to stay away from non-question questions. These are questions that are so socially scripted we don’t even register them. “How are ya?,” “What’s up?,” and “What’s going on?” are boring, shmoring. No more, please!
• My favorite highly charismatic questions tickle both warmth and competence. Try “Working on anything exciting recently?,” “Anything I can do to help you?,” or “Doing anything fun this weekend?” Or my personal favorite casual opener, “What’s good?”

Be a Verbal Chameleon: Subtly mimicking the kinds of words someone uses to match their charisma style.

Imaginary Cues

Chapter 10 – Creating a Powerful Visual Presence

Summary: Highlights the power of visual cues like color, font, and design to signal brand warmth or competence, concluding that “our visuals speak before we do.”

Elevate Your Prices, Your Look, and Your Brand

• “ALL CAPS LOWERS COMPREHENSION.”

Images that Inspire: Use visual cues to attract the right kind of attention.

Your Nonverbal Brand: Using visual cues to signal values, culture, and personality.

Color Me Confident:

• Red: Red inspires action. Use it wisely.
• Blue: Blue is a great color for triggering calm, productivity, and trust.
• Green: Green means go… and eco-friendly depending on your associations.
• Yellow: Yellow is like sunshine – it makes us feel warm and lovely, but too much and you get a sunburn.
• “Use colors that appeal to your team. Back in 2016, my company was looking to hire a marketing agency. We received several proposals but one stood out. Why? The pitch used our brand colors, fonts, and images “from our website. Instead of having their brand all over the presentation, they matched ours. It made the company’s ideas look like our ideas because they were already using our brand visual cues.”

Cues That Bias

Conclusion – Cues Best Practices

Summary: Summarizes by encouraging strategic awareness and deliberate use of cues in all interactions to “project your best self consistently and charismatically.”

Over the years, we’ve grown to appreciate how well Google would return results from a very short search query. Even though search queries have been getting longer for many years, they’re still relatively short.

AI doesn’t work that way. In fact, when it comes to using AI tools, longer is better. Our search habits aren’t translating very well, or as Seth Godin puts it “our concision is getting in the way of the insight we’re looking for.“

The solution is pretty simple – use more words when talking to AI tools. They love it!

I first discovered this when I was playing with Midjourney to create images a while back. With Midjourney, you can see the prompts that other people type, and I realized that mine were very short compared to others (and the output suffered as a result).

The hard-working squirrel

Here’s a good example. I might want to create a funny image of a squirrel working at a desk, so my prompt could be “a squirrel wearing glasses working at a desk”. It could be ok, but being more verbose is a good thing. As a point of comparison, here is this squirrel created on Midjourney, with the prompt:

A photorealistic squirrel wearing a wrinkled shirt, crooked tie, and glasses, surrounded by multiple computer monitors, sticky notes, alarm clocks, and spilled coffee. He’s frozen mid-sprint across the desk, trying to grab a ringing phone. Human colleagues in the background watch with concerned expressions. chaotic office environment, realistic lighting and shadows, 50mm lens, shot on Sony Alpha 7

As a result, the image looks amazing!

Load it up

This is a big reason we’re using a team-focused AI tool (currently on Claude), so that we can load it up with tons and tons of information about our company and our clients. It’s hard to give these tools too much info, and the more you give it, the better.

I’ve become very efficient with Google over the years, and now I’m having to continually train myself to be far more verbose.

Over the years I’ve played with various tools to help me remember to keep up with folks and other separate tools to help keep my contacts in sync.

The main tool I keep going back to for reminders is Dex, as it’s a fantastic tool, but it’s always been lacking contact sync. If I worked to keep my contacts clean and updated in there, I’d have to separately keep them clean and updated on my phone. That’s clearly not ideal.

Thankfully, Dex has finally added two-way contact sync and it’s great! It’s a little weird to set up, but once you get it going it’s fantastic. Here is a short video from their founder explaining how it works:

If you want a tool to help you keep up with the people in your life, Dex is now better than ever.

Do you use any tools like this to help you stay on top of your contacts?

Here’s a bit about what I wrote, read and learned over the past week. I hope you find it helpful!

Blog posts from the past week

• How do YOU read books? I talked to a handful of voracious readers to better understand their habits, and here are the results.
• What fact would change your mind? Asking someone “what fact would change your mind?” is a powerful things to do, but it’s even better if you ask it of yourself.
• We’ll always want human creations. AI is going to create amazing things for us, but we’ll always have a desire for human-made creations as well.
• He didn’t just start taking notes. “There is a great line in Bill Walsh’s book “The Score Takes Care of Itself”, and he says that champions behave like champions before they’re champions. I guarantee you, Mitch Rales did not build a $140B company and then start taking notes.”
• What do questions lead to? In 2019, I went on a tour of Chernobyl. The Ukrainian guide who explained what led to the nuclear accident said something that stuck in my mind. “Americans grow up with the idea that questions lead to answers,” he said. “But Soviet citizens grew up with the idea that questions lead to trouble.”
• The best apology is changed behavior. We all make mistakes, as do the people around us, and a mistake is a perfect reason to change your behavior going forward.

Books that I’m reading

• Finished reading “Cues“
• Continued reading “Never Eat Alone“
• Continued reading “How to Know a Person“
• Started reading “The Short List“
• Started reading “Dare to Serve“

Tech Rec

Stealing the idea from my friends at the Tech Talk Y’all podcast, I’ll drop in some tech recommendation every week as well.

• Dex. Dex is a tool to help you remember to check in with various contacts in your life, with a focus on business. As you meet new people you can load them in Dex and set a time frame (“reach out them every six months”) and it’ll remind you. Better yet, it also keeps an eye on your email, calendar, LinkedIn, and more, and it factors those in and delays the reminders accordingly. It’s a great tool!

It’s amazing, and I encourage you to check it out.

I hope you found some value in this. If you ever have questions, ideas, or disagreements regarding anything I write, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

In a recent podcast episode from Adam Grant titled “The internet doesn’t need your opinion“, he had a fantastic conversation with writer and activist Rebecca Solnit. The full crux of the podcast was excellent, focused on the idea of facts and conversations versus simply shouting your opinion, but it was a small side conversation that got my attention.

They got into a conversation about apologies, where a simple quote from J.S. Felts was shared:

“The only true apology is changed behavior”

We’ve all seen this. Someone does something wrong, apologizes, and then does it again. The apology may or may not have been sincere, but it certainly wasn’t meaningful. We all make mistakes, as do the people around us, and a mistake is a perfect reason to change your behavior going forward. If you don’t, was it really even an apology?

The title of this post might seem a bit obvious, but it’s not always. The inspiration for it came from Yuval Noah Harari’s book “Nexus“, where he shared:

In 2019, I went on a tour of Chernobyl. The Ukrainian guide who explained what led to the nuclear accident said something that stuck in my mind. “Americans grow up with the idea that questions lead to answers,” he said. “But Soviet citizens grew up with the idea that questions lead to trouble.”

The same is often true in business. I think most companies are good about seeking out questions and digging to find the answers, but it’s not always that way. In fact, the best people tend to ask the toughest questions, and those should be welcomed.

Tough questions can lead to improved processes and knowledge. On the other hand, companies that discourage questions (so that people “stay out of trouble”) are simply creating their own trouble in a different way.

Jensen Huang, the founder of NVIDIA, has never stopped learning. Even after he was “out of the trenches”, he still devoted much of his time to understand the latest innovations so he could make wise decisions.

In an episode of “Founders” that talked about Huang, they shared the story of someone similar to him named Mitch Rales. Rales co-founded Danaher, a company worth $140B today. At conferences, Rales can often be seen sitting near the front, always taking voracious notes. However, he doesn’t take notes because of what he’s done — he’s accomplished what he has because of habits like this.

The show compared Rales to a thought from NFL coaching great Bill Walsh, sharing:

Champions behave like champions far before their time comes, and great leaders do the same. If you think “when I make it, then I’ll start doing x”, you’re going about it the wrong way. Start the habits of a champion today to give yourself the best chance to get there.

One of the upcoming challenges with AI is that it’ll likely be able to create “better” things than humans can — better art, better stories, better movies. Of course, the definition of “better” is quite vague, but if a machine can take all of human learning and ideas and put them together, the results can be quite magical.

Whether you agree with the above or not, I think that human-made art will always have a big draw (even if we think it’s not as good). We need only look at sports as an example.

In any professional sport, the players aren’t the best that we could possible put on the field; they’re the best that we can put on the field under specific conditions (namely, no performance-enhancing drugs). We could allow professional athletes to use those drugs at their own risk, and the results would be amazing to watch. Harder throws, longer home runs, brutal tackles and ridiculous slam dunks.

As a society, we’ve decided that natural is better. There are attempts to bring enhanced players into competition (like the “Enhanced Games” coming next year), but I don’t see that making a dent in traditional sports.

AI is the same

I see AI through a similar lens. It will take over more of our world than steroids ever did, but we’ll still yearn to see art created by real humans. AI may take over many aspects of our digital lives, but hearing stories and seeing works created by human hands will always have a place.

The challenge, at least for the near future, is determining which is which. Right now, AI is often used to try to fool people, from fake Facebook posts to students “writing” papers with ChatGPT. My hope is that in the future we’ll have tools to help sift the chaff from the grain to know which is which.

Related, this is why in-person events are likely to continue to thrive. A future with AI will have amazing benefits to all of us, but human connection (and output) matters and that’s not going to change.